I think the problem with government by the people for the people is that most people are too lazy or too stupid to get the facts for themselves.

The truth is a complicated and messy proposition, something most people can't be bothered to understand. They'd rather live in a streamlined universe, where political parties embody good and evil and where candidates are either blameless and holy, or utterly wicked and depraved.

"Oh, I don't want to listen to a long, boring Kerry speech. I'll just wait and let Bush's campaign team summarize it for me. I'm sure they'll give me a fair and unbiased interpretation, because why would they lie?"

It's a dead giveaway when the people who utterly despise Kerry can't think of any specific examples to back up their irrational hatred. Instead, they just trot out the same tired old Republican spin about how Kerry wanted to go to war but changed his mind, or how he apparently involved hundreds of people in a massive conspiracy to defraud the U.S. into awarding him a Purple Heart.

Kerry's supporters aren't blameless in this, either. I swear, if I hear one more person tell me they're voting for Kerry because "anybody's better than Bush," I'm going to shit kittens.

Here's a great example of what I'm whining about.

Kerry and the rest of the Democrats voted to give George W. Bush the authority to declare war on Iraq. They did so to strengthen the president's bargaining position, and they claim they had no idea Bush was going to use his newfound power so irresponsibly. After all, Bush had promised to exhaust all other channels (including diplomacy) before going to war. He'd also promised that he would not move against Iraq without UN support. But once he got the go-ahead, both of those promises fell by the wayside.

Were they really naive enough to believe that Bush would try to avoid war? I doubt it. After all, I don't think any of the rest of us were fooled. For all of Bush's posturing about diplomacy and UN support, we KNEW war was inevitable.

The fact is, the Democrats voted to support Bush, knowing full well what he would do. They did so because, at the time, disagreeing with Bush was tantamount to admitting that you were a terrorist. And it's only now that it's publically acceptable to disagree with our actions in Iraq that they're speaking out and claiming that they were duped.

Democrats are good, but naive. Republicans are evil, manipulative monsters. That's certainly easier to grasp than the truth, right?

Meanwhile, the Republicans were working overtime to put their own spin on events. Kerry had been very outspoken about Bush's mishandling of the war in Iraq. In fact, like the rest of the Democrats, he still claimed that he was utterly taken in by Bush's promises to look for a peaceful solution.

So a few months ago, Bush asked Kerry if he would have still voted the same way if he'd known they weren't going to find any WMDs in Iraq. It was a lose/lose situation for Kerry. If he said no, the Republicans would have peed all over themselves in their zeal to accuse him of flip-flopping. And if he said yes, they'd be able to distort that into proof that Kerry had supported invading Iraq.

Kerry gave one of his typically long-winded and complicated answers. Yes, he would have voted to give the president the authority to declare war, because he felt the president should have a strong bargaining position when negotiating with Iraq. However, he made it clear that he still felt Bush had totally abused the power given him and had utterly botched things in Iraq.

No doubt he thought he could avoid the trap laid for him by simply telling the truth. But unfortunately, the truth was too complicated for everyone, so the Republicans set to work massaging the facts to suit their own needs. They portrayed Kerry and the rest of those speaking out against the war as weak and evil hypocrites working to undermine the president's noble efforts to defend our nation. Since most of Bush's supporters already believed that anyway, it was a pretty easy sell.

I'm sure this rant will fall on deaf ears, because most people have made up their minds and they're not going to let anything as trivial as the facts sway them from their myopic world view. But is it too much to ask that people make up their own minds about something, instead of simply voting against a candidate because somebody else told them to?

Yeah. Probably so.